The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

still illuminated by the setting sun, still glowing with veins of pink and white.

‘And here?’ he said. ‘What is this? Is it some sort of church?’

‘I like that,’ said Dina, nodding and pursing her lips. ‘But no. It’s the Heresiarchy, the court and judgement chamber of the Heresiarch, the centre of the whole place, its heart, its core.’

‘What happens here?’ asked Fitz. He had taken a few steps towards the building, raising his hand as if he would lay it on the stone.

‘No one knows, really,’ said Dina. ‘It’s a mystery.’

‘Why don’t you find out, then?’ said Fitz.

‘No, I mean, it’s a mystery in the proper sense of the word. There are rites, arcana, occult ceremonies. These are the hidden, most secret rules of the game.’

‘Everyone keeps talking about this game,’ said Fitz. He had stepped to the wall of the Heresiarchy, and was running his hand over the polished pink marble. It drew him like a magnet. ‘But I haven’t seen anyone playing any games.’ Following a streak of white that writhed through the stone slab, his fingers brushed towards the entrance to the Heresiarchy, towards its great oak door, towards the iron handle that stood at its centre.

Dina stepped to him, light as a cat, and covered his hand with hers.

‘What’s the game?’ asked Fitz. He had fallen into a kind of reverie. His heart swelled in pulses of tide, and his vision swam. Something urgent, a kind of throbbing that was almost a shaking, began around his ears.

‘What isn’t the game?’ whispered Dina. Her mouth was very close to his ear. ‘We’re born into a world of rules. Pick something up and drop it, and it falls. That’s a rule. Love someone, and lose them, and it hurts. That’s a rule. Do some things well, and you become rich. Do other things well, and you go to prison. Everything, every action you might take, every word you might utter, every thought you might entertain, is governed by rules. You could wake in the morning and go outside without dressing – why shouldn’t you? Because wearing clothes is a rule. Otherwise you might as well tie shoes to your head and wear hats on your feet. You drive down the street and come to a traffic light. Red means stop, green means go, and you stop, and you go, because those are rules. Don’t kill. Don’t take what isn’t yours. Don’t go where you don’t belong.’

Fitz pushed his hand towards the big iron handle at the centre of the oak door. ‘I want to go in,’ he murmured.

‘No one goes in there except the Heresiarch,’ said Dina. Her voice in his ear was like her eyes: cold, blue, vast, far. Then, suddenly, her hand tightened on his, and she yanked it backwards, pulling his arm painfully across his back.

‘All you need to do is learn the rules,’ she said, her voice hardly more than a breath, ‘and if you play by them – exactly and perfectly by them – then you win the game. Every time. In the end, you don’t even need to play it. It’s over before it begins.’

The game is already ended.

Fitz wrenched himself away, spun, and stared at Dina. He half expected to find her transfigured, changed into some monstrous shape; but she was the same girl: her body at once relaxed, and ready, her eyes level and serious, a little twist of mockery at the corners of her mouth. He knew he should fear her. He knew he should be angry. And yet the moment he looked at her, all he felt was her spell.

‘No one goes in there but the Heresiarch,’ she repeated – as if none of the rest of it had happened. ‘Only there isn’t a Heresiarch at the moment,’ she added. ‘Not since he died. We’re in an interregnum.’

Fitz wanted more than anything to keep looking at Dina; he wanted to watch her, to study her, to find out who she was, how she worked, and what she meant to do. But he couldn’t bear to do it; he felt instinctively that the closer he got, the more he knew, the greater would be the danger. His eyes swerved, and he looked out over the whole of the Heresy, trying to find in its courts and their geometry, in its towers and domes, its roofs and ridges, instead, some explanation for the way Dina’s touch had turned from tender to torture.

‘Lesson one, remember?’ she said quietly.

Fitz sighed, a long and heavy breath that allowed all his tension to float out of him. He felt for a breath like he was hanging from the roof of the Old Friary. ‘Shouldn’t we go?’ he said.

Dina didn’t answer, but she led the way. Skipping down the grand stairs of the Heresiarch’s court, down to their narrow outlet and the low passage that led back to the Porch, Fitz had the distinct sense that he was being funnelled, as water into a jug. It made him uneasy, so uneasy that when he caught up with Dina at the Porch door, he hesitated, half in mind to go back to his tower – no matter what the Officers wanted from him. From within the Porch, he could hear them talking in animated voices, and the glow now – against the settling evening – was much brighter than earlier.

Dina cleared her throat.

‘What should I do?’ he asked.

‘What do you think you should do?’ Dina replied.

Fine.

Fitz stepped up, took the knocker in his hand, and brought it down, hard, on the wood of the door three times.

‘Not what I would have done,’ said Dina. She seemed almost amused. That mockery.

The Registrar opened the door. Dressed in the same, long belted coat in which Fitz had seen him before, and wearing his round red cap, he now struck Fitz anew. For one thing, he stood taller by a head than any man Fitz had encountered in his life, totally out of keeping with the low-raftered room in